Viking and Medieval Scandinavia

In this article, I discuss the significance of foreign objects and foreign material culture in Viking-Age Scandinavia. Changes in the use of imported objects as dress accessories show that Scandinavian peoples gradually became closer to the international community through the adaptation of foreign customs. These changes signal a shift in how Scandinavians viewed their non-Scandinavian neighbours. A study of the appropriation of foreign objects can help us to appreciate how complex the transformation of society in this era was. The article is based on a comprehensive study of the use of foreign objects in eastern Norway (Aannestad 2015).

The tongue is given unusual prominence in Einarr Skúlason's Geisli, a verse panegyric composed for the occasion of St Óláfr's translation to the new cathedral at Trondheim around 1153. This article identifies several traditions that underlie Einarr's emphasis on the tongue in his poem: skaldic poetics, which gave the tongue agency as the instigator and medium of oral composition; the Christian-Latin Unsagbarkeitstopos ('inexpressibility topos'), in which the ineffable glory of God is inexpressible by any number of human tongues; and legends describing St Óláfr healing facial injuries that are widespread in Old Norse-Icelandic prose hagiographies. Óláfr's biographers note that, on more than one occasion in his life, the king was involved in merciless mutilation of people's tongues or other body parts. The emphasis that the narratives place on his post-mortem healing miracles can be read as a posthumous attempt to expiate the living king's less than saintly actions.

This paper is a critical response to the recently published 'A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics' (Hedenstierna-Jonson and others, 2017). Its purpose is to investigate the archaeological sources involved in the DNA research on Birka grave 581. It shows that problems exist with both the excavation methodology and the recording strategy employed by its investigators and publishers. Based on the analysis of documentation and finds kept at the Swedish Historical Museum, this paper comes to the conclusion that grave 581 contained a primary male grave with weaponry and a secondary female burial.

This article applies the anthropological concept of taboo to meat-eating prohibitions in medieval Scandinavia. The goals of this article are threefold: to examine the evidence for meat-based dietary proscriptions in medieval Scandinavia, mostly in legal texts; to speculate upon the historical causes for these largely religious taboos, especially the Christian aversion to eating horse meat; and to explore the depiction of taboo meat as disgusting, and characters who break meat-eating taboos as monstrous, in saga literature. I thus not only question which animals were consumed for their meat, but why, and what this might signify.

Miniature shields are some of the most intriguing metal objects found across Scandinavia and the wider Viking world. They are mainly known from cremation and inhumation graves, in which they typically accompany women, but also from hoards, settlement sites, and trading ports. Various scholars have usually interpreted miniature shields as amulets and symbols of protection with either pagan or Christian connotations. By (re)assessing a large corpus of miniature shields from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Poland, and Sweden, this paper seeks to nuance previous views on these objects and provides new thoughts on their different types, usage, and meaning.

The present article provides a critical reading of the tale of King Haraldr hárfagri and Snjófríðr. Comparison of its variants and an unrelated fourteenth-century Castilian story about the love of King Alfonso VIII and a Jewish girl suggests that the tale functions as a discursive attempt to deal with the inherent frailty of the state, whether the aim is to defend the state or attack it. Analysis of the variants of the tale further reveals a common mode of operation, namely the resort to an othering discourse whose details may vary but whose aim remains stable: to reconfigure as less than human those who would threaten the state.

This paper takes a fresh look at the use of judicial violence in the societies of Viking-Age England and Scandinavia. Using interdisciplinary methodologies, it considers legal, historical, literary, and archaeological evidence for judicially-prescribed maiming and execution. Using this evidence, it describes the English and Scandinavian systems of judicial violence in new detail, reflecting on important aspects of each in turn before turning to a more comparative approach to redirect debate and focus future work.

In 1920 the Swedish historian Gottfrid Carlsson argued that Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, the leader of the Swedish revolt against King Erik of Pomerania, was venerated as a saint in medieval Sweden. In my article I question Carlsson's conclusion and demonstrate that such a cult did not exist.

In this article the careers of four bishops who served in the diocese of Hólar in the North of Iceland between 1201 and 1267 are examined. For the Church of Iceland this was a period of reform as the Church was asserting its independence within its own sphere of society. This was contested by laymen who were reluctant to acknowledge the Church as an institution with its own laws and a jurisdiction over its members. For their part, bishops found it hard to desist from participating in secular politics. The career paths of the bishops Guðmundr (r. 1203–37), Bótólfr (r. 1238–46), Heinrekr (r. 1247–60), and Brandr (r. 1263–64) are mapped out and their different priorities and the distinctive relationship of each of these individuals to the secular ruling class is made the subject of comparison and analysis. Church-state relations in thirteenth-century Iceland and Norway turn out to be an important theme; while the alliance of the Church with the rising power of local chieftains seems to have been troublesome and constraining for the Church, its alliance with the distant Norwegian king turned out to be to its advantage, at least for a formative period following 1247.

This article examines enthronement as a rite of inauguration in early Rus in the tenth to twelfth centuries, and what the practice of enthronement suggests in terms of the earliest mechanics of princely power in Rus. Enthronement is represented as a key constitutive act by the chronicles of Rus, which were composed by churchmen in the monasteries of Rus. Although the chronicles present the princes of Rus and their acts according to a Christian and Byzantine literary framework, the practices of power described suggest links with other cultural spheres, such as medieval Scandinavia. The chronicles of Rus thus incorporate practices and symbols of power referenced in the sagas and represented by artefacts, which may have reflected local practices in Rus.